How to Learn Something

This is a personal, non-political, post. I was reflecting last night on a conversation I had from a professor in college. Before I tell you about that conversation let me tell you about what a math teacher told the class in high school.

She said there’s no excuse not to finish your homework and get every answer correct because you should be able to spend as much time as possible to get the right answer. If you can’t figure it out just keep grinding away at it until you figure it out. This concept of learning has been applied throughout much of my life. In college Physics we had to do homework assigned on the Internet. It would take forever to come up with the correct answers, if you couldn’t get it right you lost points. The last job I had had a similar mindset. They just set me in front of the computer and told me to figure out the problem. If I asked too many questions, which was very few, they got irate.

The main thing I learned from the professor in college I mentioned above was as follows. I went to his office hours to get help on a program I was writing, it was a computer science class. I was trying to explain to him the problem I had. He asked, “How long did you spend on this?” I said, “A couple of hours.” He asked, “What do you normally do when you can’t figure out a problem?” I told him I just read the book or kept trying random things until I got the right answer. He got irritated and asked why I didn’t just go to a teacher’s assistant for help. He pointed out that it would only of taken a TA 5 minutes or so to explain the answer versus the hours I spent wasting my time. I had an epiphany.

Like I said, many people in the world, maybe even most would rather you take all day to figure something out than take five minutes out of their day to have them help you. This mindset is pervasive throughout education and business. Teachers would rather deduct points on homework and tests than help you with a problem and bosses would rather you spent all day figuring something out than ask someone the answer.